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Polish Conference

Resolution Calls for Release of Dead Sea Scrolls

For the first time, the community of Dead Sea Scrolls scholars has, as a profession, confronted the unusual delay in publication of so many of the texts from Qumran.^a

Ironically, this occurred not in the U.S. or Israel but in Poland, under the auspices of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

The cry for freedom for the still-secret Dead Sea Scroll texts—scholars are not even permitted to see photographs of the unpublished texts—comes from Mogilany, a little village outside Krakow, where prominent scholars from the United States, England, Israel, Germany, France, Australia, as well as from Poland and Russia, gathered each day for five days last September in the manor house of the village to deliver papers and talk to one another in an effort to understand the Dead Sea Scrolls and the people who wrote them.

One evening was devoted to the fact that so many Qumran texts are still unavailable to the scholars—more than 30 years after their discovery. At the end of the session, the colloquium of scholars adopted a resolution, known as the Mogilany Resolution of 1989, which stated: